“In greater support of his word”: Monument and Museum Discourse in Finnegans Wake

The ruins of the Forum failed to move Joyce during his stay in Rome in 1906 and 1907. Disappointed by what he saw as their irrelevance to historical understanding and their transformation into spectacle, he wrote his brother Stanislaus, "Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother's corpse" (LettersII 165). In his 1885 Presidential Address to the Cork Young Ireland Society, William O'Brien used a similar mortuary metaphor to compare the regenerate Irish favorably with the "degenerate" Romans:

The creatures who dwell around the ruins of the Coliseum still call themselves Romans, and masquerade in the grave-clothes of their august ancestors; but nobody expects new Ciceros to arise among the degenerate chatterers of the Corso. . . . The Irish race of to-day, on the contrary, take up their mission just where English aggression cut it short seven centuries ago, and leap to their feet as buoyantly as though the whole hideous tragedy of the intervening ages were but the nightmare of an uneasy sleeper.¹

Themselves heirs to an ancient civilization, O'Brien comments, the Irish differ from the Romans in having achieved a "second youth" through a return to the values of the "Golden Age" (10). This rebirth is evident not just in the intense Irish effort to win Home Rule, O'Brien notes, but also in the contrast between the nation's repair of its "ruined shrines" and Rome's neglect of its decaying monuments (10).² O'Brien's regard for archaeological restoration as evidence of a cultural and political revival typifies Irish patriotic attitudes at a time when the museum's rising cultural consecration made the Dublin Museum of Science and Art a crucial stage on which nationalists sought to represent their vision of a historically continuous Irish nation. The museum's importance for supplying the often lamented lack of Irish historiography while fostering a sense of national heritage and belonging can be witnessed in the repeated calls of nationalists like Thomas Davis for the preservation of the nation's archaeology and antiquities and the establishment of museums in which to exhibit them.³

What value for the representation of history does the museum assume in Joyce's Finnegans Wake? Critics have tended to confine their studies of the Museyroom to the celebrated passage in I.i (FW 8.09-10.23), which represents the archetypal family drama in military-historical terms.⁴ I would like to focus more broadly on the Museyroom's identification with the Wellington Monument and the key evidentiary role of both in HCE's self-defense against the Cad in I.ii and the gossipy accounts of the event given in I.iii. A brief survey of the nineteenth-century literature on Ireland's "ruined shrines" reveals a similarity among HCE's repeated appeals to the Monument and Museyroom "[i]n greater support of his word," witnesses' "ventriloquent" testimony concerning the HCE-Cad encounter in Phoenix Park, and Irish nationalist enlistments of archaeology, museums, and monuments in the service of historical and political claims (FW 36.07-08, 56.05-06). The Monument and Museyroom's contested privileging as a bearer of historical meaning—as both a "sign of our ruru redemption" (FW 36.24-25) and proof of HCE's guilt—is rooted, I argue, in the power of archaeological remains and monuments as instruments of Irish nationalism and British imperialism.

O'Brien was able to claim a link between cultural regeneration and the restoration of Ireland's ruined shrines because their capacity to represent the imagined community had been established half a century before, thanks largely to the Ordnance Survey of Ireland (1824-1841). Begun as a map-making and gazetteering project led by a British officer named Thomas Larcom, the Ordnance Survey soon expanded under the care of the Irish archaeologist George Petrie into a comprehensive study of the physical landscape that combined scientific methodology with the listing of original place names and the description of architectural remains. As a result, the entire geography of Ireland was transformed into a...